THE 592 GUARDIAN ♦ INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM

PART I: WHERE THE OIL MONEY DOESN’T REACH

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The Cuban migrant crisis Guyana has no Policy to answer

By Staff Writer  | The 592 Guardian Investigative Desk

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Armando no longer has a bathroom. His family’s house in Havana collapsed three years ago, and he now sleeps in a makeshift shelter inside an abandoned office building, using a plastic bag where a toilet used to be. He has not spoken out publicly about it, not the way a man who spent his life painting portraits of his country might once have wanted to. “I’m already hungry here,” he told a Human Rights Watch researcher this year. “If I speak out, I’ll just end up being hungry in prison.”

That is the calculation facing millions of Cubans: a state that cannot keep the lights on, the water running, or the pharmacy shelves stocked, but that can still find the resources to imprison a man for painting “how long, they are killing us” on a wall. An oil blockade imposed by the United States in January 2026 has driven that collapse into a new phase, cutting off the fuel Cuba depends on for electricity, water pumping, garbage collection, and the transport of flour to its bakeries. Roughly 800 Cubans are currently held as political prisoners for saying so.

Some of those who can leave are choosing, of all places, Guyana.

It is an unlikely destination on paper — a country of fewer than a million people, on the edge of the Caribbean, better known until recently for emigration than immigration. But Guyana is now the world’s fastest-growing economy, propelled by offshore oil discoveries that have transformed it from one of the hemisphere’s poorest nations into one of its most cash-flush. It does not require Cubans to obtain a visa before arrival. And its construction boom needs workers faster than its own population can supply them.

This desk’s investigation — including direct testimony from a Cuban migrant who escaped exploitative conditions in Guyana’s interior, published in these pages in April — found that need has not translated into protection. What we found instead was a labor recruitment pipeline operating in a legal vacuum, and a government response defined by jurisdictional shrugging.

A LABOR FORCE WITH NO STATUS

The people building Guyana’s boom are, increasingly, Cuban. Bloomberg has reported that construction firms behind the country’s roads, bridges, and infrastructure projects are turning to Cuban migrants as a primary new labor source, drawn by an economy supercharged by the same oil wealth connected, in a roundabout way, to the crisis pushing them out of Cuba. One government official told a television crew this year that Guyana now needs its migrant workforce as much as that workforce needs Guyana — filling gaps in construction, security, and cleaning that the domestic labor market cannot.

But Cuba is not a CARICOM member state, so its citizens arrive without the automatic work authorization and freedom of movement afforded migrants from within the Caribbean bloc. What has emerged instead is a large, informal labor force operating largely outside the system Guyana has built to register foreign workers — a system the government has itself acknowledged it is unprepared to manage at this scale.

The consequences of that informality are documented, and not only by this desk. One Cuban migrant who publicly warned others considering the move described working construction from seven in the morning to seven at night for roughly 6,000 Guyanese dollars a day — well under a dollar an hour, and well below Guyana’s minimum wage. He described street violence targeting migrants.

Our own reporting found conditions considerably worse than underpayment. A Cuban migrant who spoke to The 592 Guardian after escaping through Brazil described being recruited under a “work now, pay later” scheme: passage to Guyana in exchange for eight months of labor. On arrival, his passport was confiscated without explanation. He was housed with others in a room he described as having no privacy, air, or light, then rotated between construction sites and illegal mining operations. When his eight months elapsed, he was told he now owed for food and transport on top of the original debt — a balance that, he said, was never designed to reach zero. He escaped after a year and a half. Two women who had traveled with him in the same transport did not.

WHAT THE US STATE DEPARTMENT ALREADY DOCUMENTED

This vulnerability is not new, and it is not undocumented. The State Department’s most recent Trafficking in Persons report on Guyana states plainly that migrants — including Cubans, alongside Haitians, Venezuelans, and others — are among the primary victims of trafficking in the country, concentrated in mining, forestry, agriculture, and domestic service. The report notes that women and children from Cuba are at heightened risk of sex trafficking in Guyana’s mining communities specifically. It also documents hundreds of Cuban workers in Guyana understood to be affiliated with state-run labor missions, whose wages the Guyanese government has paid directly to the Cuban state — an arrangement the report identifies as one Havana has historically used to withhold earnings from the workers who did the work.

The same report recommends Guyana increase labor inspections at high-risk worksites, eliminate recruitment fees charged to workers, and screen vulnerable migrant populations for trafficking indicators before deportation — recommendations that describe, by implication, a system currently failing to do those things.

Our own findings corroborate that failure from the inside. The recruitment networks operating this pipeline advertise openly on Facebook, Instagram, and encrypted WhatsApp groups under banners like “Passage to Guyana: Work and Pay Later.” The operators pose as travel facilitators or small business agents; this desk found little evidence any are legally registered or subject to oversight. Guyana’s labor laws contain no comprehensive framework for regulating foreign recruitment agencies. Once inside the country, migrants exist in a status that is neither documented employment nor formal residency — a vacuum multiple migrants said is enforced by fear as much as by law.                                              “They keep us quiet with fear,” one Venezuelan worker told this desk. “Who will we go to? The police? They are friends with the same people who brought us.”

ENFORCEMENT AIMED THE WRONG WAY

Where the Guyanese state has acted, it has acted against the migrants, not the networks that traffic them. In April, a Cuban national was fined and deported within days of entering Guyana irregularly; a Guyanese official warned that “those who violate the law will face the full weight of the law.” A year earlier, another Cuban migrant was sentenced to three years in prison for the same category of offense — a marked escalation from the simple deportations once applied. Guyana has become, alongside its role as destination, a transit corridor migrants pass through en route to Brazil, and the state’s response to that flow has been prosecutorial toward arrivals, not toward the recruiters who profit from them.

When this desk raised the pattern of confiscated documents, unpaid wages, and confinement with officials, the response was jurisdictional deflection. “We need more data,” one senior agency source said. “We can’t regulate what we can’t track.” Labor points to immigration; immigration points to private enterprise. The cases fall between ministries, and in that gap, the recruitment networks operate undisturbed.

THE FRAMEWORK THAT DOESN’T EXIST

What Guyana has not built, in the middle of an oil boom it did not expect and a migration wave it did not plan for, is a coherent policy answer to the question of who these arrivals are and what they are owed. There is no dedicated Cuban migration framework — nothing analogous to the CARICOM free-movement provisions governing arrivals from Jamaica or Trinidad, nothing that formally distinguishes an economic migrant from an asylum seeker from a trafficking victim. What exists instead is an employer-driven work permit system built for a smaller, slower-moving economy, straining under a labor force arriving faster than the Ministry of Home Affairs can register it — a vacuum that recruitment networks have learned to exploit as reliably as any construction firm.

WHAT THIS DEMANDS OF GUYANA

Guyana did not create the crisis driving Cubans to its shores. That responsibility sits with a Cuban state that would rather imprison a protester than fix a water main, and with a US blockade that has turned an already-decayed economy into a humanitarian emergency. But responsibility for what happens to people once they arrive on Guyanese soil belongs to Guyana — specifically to the ministries with the authority to prevent exploitation and the standing capacity, and so far the unused capacity, to build the machinery to do it.

That machinery is not exotic: registration systems migrants can access without fear of immediate deportation; labor inspections at the sites the State Department has already flagged as high-risk; a licensing and prosecution regime for recruitment operators, not merely for the people they recruit; a legal pathway that does not force a Cuban fleeing a collapsed state into the same unprotected status as an employer’s convenience hire.

Armando, weighing his options from the wreckage of his own collapsed house, put it starkly: whether the extractive power is Washington or Havana, ordinary people do not benefit either way.

Guyana has the chance, uniquely, to be neither — to take the oil wealth reshaping its economy and use some measure of it to ensure the people building that economy are not also being quietly consumed by it. So far, the government has not shown it intends to.

Part II of this investigation examines the recruitment networks directly, the fate of migrants who disappear inside them, and what accountability — if any — has followed.

The 592 Guardian is continuing to investigate conditions facing Cuban migrant workers in Guyana. Readers or sources with direct knowledge are invited to come forward.

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ Independent Accountability Journalism The Corpse in the Dossier           

Guyana prepares to defend its record on forced labor in Washington. One dead man in Region Seven makes that defense incoherent.

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On July 7,2026, a representative of the Government of     Guyana will appear before the United States Trade Representative’s Section 301 Committee in Washington, D.C., and argue that this country takes forced labor seriously. The Ministry of Labor and Manpower Planning has confirmed  its intention to appear at the public hearing, where it will present what Foreign Secretary Robert Persaud describes as evidence of Guyana’s efforts to ‘prevent and prohibit all aspects of forced labor.‘ The stakes are not trivial: the USTR has proposed a 12.5 percent additional tariff on Guyanese exports — a penalty applicable to new categories of trade beyond the petroleum and bauxite carve-outs currently in effect, with agricultural exports particularly exposed.

This editorial does not dispute Guyana’s right to defend itself before an international forum. What it disputes, with documented precision, is the premise on which that defense will rest. Because somewhere between the ministry’s press releases and the Washington hearing room lies an inconvenient fact that no government spokesperson has adequately addressed: Sekhar Chhetri is dead.

The Batavia Record

Chhetri, an Indian national recruited to operate heavy equipment at the EKAA HRIM Earth Resources Management quarry in Batavia Village, Region Seven, died on May 12, 2026.

He was one of 38 Indian workers who had been brought to Guyana under contracts that the Ministry of Labor’s own subsequent review found to be in violation of the Labor Act and the National Minimum Wage Order. Those contracts required workers to perform 72-hour weeks as a base condition, denied overtime regardless of the operational reason, and imposed exit penalties of between USD 3,000 and USD 5,000 — penalties that Guyanese law renders entirely unenforceable but which, in the geographic isolation of the Cuyuni-Mazaruni interior, functioned as a practical chokehold.

The workers’ passports had been confiscated by the company upon arrival. Under both Guyanese law and the international indicators framework developed by the International Labour Organisation, passport confiscation is not a minor administrative irregularity. It is a primary indicator of forced labour. The Combating of Trafficking in Persons Act provides imprisonment of up to five years for any employer who knowingly confiscates a worker’s travel documents. The Ministry of Labour confirmed the confiscation had occurred. No prosecution under that statute has been announced.

The workers described being denied clean drinking water and adequate food — a particular hardship for the Hindu vegetarians among them. One worker was repatriated after losing four fingers in an unguarded industrial accident. A second worker, Chhetri, died at the site.

The Ministry confirmed it was aware of the death and that it would ‘form part of the ongoing investigation.’ Calls were made for an independent autopsy. The question of whether Chhetri’s remains were exhumed before being returned to his family in India — as opposition voices demanded — has received no public answer from the state.

The Managed Resolution

What happened next follows a pattern that accountability journalists in this country have documented across multiple sectors: the crisis was managed, not resolved. Minister of Labour Keoma Griffith, to his credit, moved with visible urgency once the story became public — meeting with the Acting Indian High Commissioner, issuing an ultimatum, and personally demanding the return of the passports. He is to be commended for taking those steps. But the minister simultaneously declined, repeatedly and on the record, to characterise passport confiscation as trafficking.

‘I’m not going to make an allegation of human trafficking without a demand,’ he stated — an explanation that conflicted the legal standard with the evidentiary record, since the demand element of the trafficking statute concerns the trafficker’s demand for services or payment, not a demand by a minister.

EKAA HRIM held a press conference at which its representative, Carl Methuvel, projected corporate ledgers and catering logs onto a screen and declared the allegations ‘malicious fabrications.’ The company claimed it had imported a specialised chef from India to accommodate vegetarian dietary requirements. This theatre of compliance was rewarded. On May 25, the company announced that outstanding wages for April and May 2026 had been settled. The Ministry was formally notified. The file, for practical purposes, began closing.

By June 10, 33 of the 37 surviving workers had been repatriated — 28 of them at the expense not of the state or the company but of Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed, who had first brought the matter to public attention. Five left on EKAA HRIM’s account. Four remained in Guyana having found alternative employment.

The Ministry claimed that 15 workers had expressed a desire to stay; Mohamed publicly called that claim a lie. No criminal charges have been laid against EKAA HRIM or its principals under the Trafficking in Persons Act, the Labour Act, or the Occupational Safety and Health Act. The quarry, which represents a USD 10 million investment, continued operating.

The Presidential Photograph

EKAA HRIM Earth Resources Management is not a fly-by-night operation that slipped through regulatory cracks. Its quarry commissioning ceremony in September 2023 was attended by President Dr. Irfaan Ali. The Ministry of Natural Resources shared photographs of the occasion on social media.” The company’s founder, Saju Bhaskar — the Coimbatore-based head of Texila American University — served as secretary of the India-Guyana Chamber of Commerce, co-inaugurated in July 2023 by President Ali and Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar”.

This is not obscure corporate history. It is the documented context for a question the government has not answered: if the President was present to bless this investment, why did two years pass — years during which complaints were filed through India’s CPGRAMS and MADAD consular grievance portals — without a single regulatory inspection of the conditions in which the workforce lived?

The MADAD portal record is particularly damaging. Complaints from workers at the Batavia site date to 2024 at minimum. One former crusher manager, Manikkam, documented that he was denied medical treatment, had five contract copies forcibly taken from him, had USD 3,000 illegally deducted from his salary over his first six months, and was forced under duress to sign a resignation letter at the company’s Georgetown office.

He spent GYD 300,000 of his own money at the Georgetown Public Hospital for illnesses contracted at the site. The Indian High Commission’s recorded response to RTI filings, as documented by Kaieteur News, was to advise workers to take matters up with the embassy — the same embassy doing the advising. The grievance infrastructure was not deficient; it was present and functioning, and the complaints were being systematically closed.

The Washington Argument and Its Internal Contradiction

Against this backdrop, Guyana now proposes to tell the USTR that it is committed to preventing and prohibiting all aspects of forced labor. The 592 Guardian does not suggest this commitment is insincere at the level of ministerial rhetoric.

We do argue that rhetoric is not a policy record, and that Washington is being invited to evaluate a policy record.

That record shows: a company operating for at least two years under conditions exhibiting multiple ILO indicators of forced labour, including passport confiscation, debt bondage through exit penalties, restriction of freedom of movement, and failure to pay wages; a worker who died; a ministry that, once compelled to act by opposition disclosure and press coverage, secured the return of passports and outstanding wages but declined to prosecute; a forensic investigation into Chhetri’s death whose conclusions have not been made public; and a quarry that continues to hold its concession

 The USTR’s Section 301 framework does not require Guyana to be a perfect enforcer. It requires Guyana to demonstrate that it imposes and effectively enforces a prohibition on forced-labour imports. The distinction between the 12.5 percent tier — where Guyana currently sits — and the 10 percent tier is precisely the difference between having no effective prohibition and having one that is imperfectly enforced. The government’s Washington appearance could, in principle, argue for movement to the lower tier by demonstrating recent enforcement action.

But enforcement action requires charges, convictions, or at minimum prosecutorial referrals. There are none.

What Accountability Requires

This editorial calls for three things before Guyana’s representative boards a flight to Washington.

First, the Ministry of Labor must publish the findings of the forensic investigation into the death of Sekhar Chhetri. The public was told this death would form part of the investigation. Weeks have passed. The worker’s body has been returned to his family in India. If the state cannot account for how a man died under its regulatory jurisdiction, it has no business representing its enforcement record to a foreign government.

Second, the Guyana Police Force and the Director of Public Prosecutions must publicly state whether they have reviewed the EKAA HRIM matter for criminal referral under the Combating of Trafficking in Persons Act. The confiscation of passports was confirmed by the minister himself. That act is statutory. The absence of any prosecutorial comment is not neutrality — it is a policy decision, and it should be made explicit.

Third, the government must answer the question that the Presidential photograph poses directly: what mechanism, if any, exists to monitor the labour conditions of foreign workers in remote concession operations after a head of state has associated himself with an investment’s commissioning? If the answer is that no such mechanism exists, that is not a regulatory gap — it is a structural failure that the USTR finding has now made internationally visible.

Guyana deserves to avoid an economically damaging tariff. Its agricultural sector, its rice producers, its emerging non-oil exporters deserve a fair hearing.

But a hearing built on a record that elides a dead worker, suspended prosecutions, and a two-year failure of oversight is not a defense of labor standards. It is a performance of them. Washington will notice the difference, even if Georgetown prefers not to.

— The Editorial Board, The 592 Guardian

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦INVESTIGATIVE REPORT♦ JUNE 2026

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EXPORTING ECOCIDE

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How Brazil’s Gold-Laundering Fraud Is Crossing Into the Guiana Shield — A Comparative Assessment of Guyana’s Exposure                                                                    Prepared for the Transparency Institute of Guyana Inc.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

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In June 2026, Greenpeace Brazil published Gold Laundering in the Amazon: Anatomy of a Fraud, a forensic account of how Brazil’s Garimpo Permit regime has been converted into a laundering instrument for gold stolen from Indigenous Lands and Conservation Units. Of 187 mining tenements the organization examined across Pará, Mato Grosso, and Rondônia, 98 showed irregularities consistent with fraud, together accounting for 25.3 tons of gold worth an estimated R$18.4 billion. The pattern Greenpeace documented was not a single bad actor but a structural feature of the permitting system itself: permits granted without independent geological verification, production volumes accepted on the word of the permit holder, and buyers shielded for a decade by a legal presumption of good faith that Brazil’s Supreme Court only struck down in 2025.

This assessment argues that the same structural conditions are already present in Guyana, and that Guyana is not a hypothetical extension of Brazil’s problem but a documented destination for it. The Guiana Shield is a single contiguous goldfield split across several jurisdictions with wildly uneven enforcement; when Brazil tightens its grip on illegal mining, capital, equipment, and personnel move to whichever neighboring jurisdiction offers the path of least resistance.

The clearest current illustration is the Marudi mining district in Region Nine, where a Special Mining Permit issued to a cooperative that no longer legally exists continues to generate gold sales, and where a Brazilian national recently sentenced to over twenty-two years for organizing illegal mining inside Yanomami Indigenous Territory has been photographed with senior Guyanese officials.

This is a desk-based comparative assessment, built on public reporting, court records cited in the Brazilian and Guyanese press, regional research, and the Greenpeace report itself. It does not attempt the satellite-and-productivity audit Greenpeace conducted in Brazil, because that capability does not currently exist inside Guyanese civil society, and because the underlying GGMC and Guyana Gold Board declaration records such an audit would need are not realistically obtainable through Guyana’s domestic information-access channels — a constraint TIGI’s own experience with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative process illustrates directly.

That gap is the basis for this brief’s central recommendation: that TIGI formally invite Greenpeace’s gold-forensics team to extend its methodology to Guyana’s highest-risk permits, beginning with Marudi.                   

THE BRAZILIAN TEMPLATE: ANATOMY OF A FRAUD

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Brazil’s Garimpo Permit, or Permissão de Lavra Garimpeira (PLG), was created in 1989 to bring small-scale, cooperative mining into a simplified legal regime. Over time, and especially after prior mineral-survey requirements were waived to speed the regularization of existing operations, the PLG became something else: a documentary shell. Because permit holders themselves declare how much gold a site is capable of producing, with no independent geological check, a PLG can certify almost any volume of gold as legitimately mined, regardless of what is actually happening on the ground.

Greenpeace Brazil sorted the 98 irregular permits it found into two categories. Ghost garimpo mines, just under a third of the irregular permits but nearly half the declared tonnage, showed no mining activity whatsoever on satellite imagery or flyover — meaning the permit existed purely to supply a paper trail for gold mined somewhere else entirely, including inside Indigenous Lands.

Industrial-scale garimpo operations, the larger category by count, involved multiple permits held by the same cooperative or by linked titleholders, combined into operations far beyond the legal size limit for small-scale mining, with no visible boundary between tenements on the ground.

The buying side of this system was protected for a decade by a 2013 law presuming the legality and good faith of brokers who bought gold from PLG holders, provided the seller supplied basic paperwork. Brazil’s Supreme Court declared that presumption unconstitutional in March 2025, after finding it had functioned as a shield for exactly the laundering pattern Greenpeace later documented. Federal audit bodies reached similar conclusions: a 2025 audit found the national mining agency was not exercising its legal authority to require geological surveys, and a 2022 audit had already found the agency failed to enforce even basic documentation standards. Greenpeace’s recommendation to Brazilian regulators was correspondingly narrow and specific — require the surveys the law already allows for, and cancel permits that have generated royalty payments with no corresponding evidence of mining.   

ONE GOLDFIELD, SEVERAL JURISDICTIONS: THE LEAKAGE PROBLEM

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“The Guiana Shield does not respect the borders drawn across it. The same greenstone geology that produces gold in Pará and Roraima continues, structurally uninterrupted, through Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana, and the population of small-scale miners working it has moved across those borders for over a century, following wherever enforcement is weakest and prices are highest.”

This is not speculation; it is measured. A 2025 study using deep-learning analysis of satellite imagery across Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana found a 995 percent increase in the number of active mine sites and a 1,411 percent increase in total mined area between 1995 and 2024 — figures that track closely with the 1,100 percent expansion of garimpo area Greenpeace documented across the Brazilian Amazon over a similar period.

Peer-reviewed research on the region’s deforestation patterns has identified the underlying mechanism directly: tighter enforcement in one Guiana Shield jurisdiction correlates with reduced mining-driven deforestation there, and a corresponding rise next door. French Guiana’s repression campaign after 2008 is the clearest documented case; Suriname and Guyana absorbed much of what it displaced.

Brazil has just run a larger version of the same experiment. Military and federal police operations against illegal mining inside Yanomami Indigenous Territory pushed garimpeiro capital and labor into Venezuela and Guyana, a migration regional security researchers already describe as established fact rather than future risk. Guyana has hosted large populations of Brazilian miners before, with one historical estimate placing an enclave in the tens of thousands at the turn of the millennium during an earlier crackdown cycle in Venezuela.

“What is different this time is the scale of Guyana’s own gold sector, the volume of capital now attached to it, and the fact that the people arriving are not only artisanal miners displaced by enforcement but, in at least one documented case, the organizers of large-scale criminal operations themselves.”

 CASE STUDY: THE PERMIT THAT OUTLIVED ITS HOLDER

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Mazoa Hill, in the Marudi mining district of Region Nine, is the clearest illustration available of how Brazil’s fraud pattern would look transplanted into Guyana’s permitting architecture.

In 2021, an agreement gave the Rupununi Miners Association Cooperative Society a Special Mining Permit covering a 400-hectare section inside a larger concession held by the Canadian company Golden Shield Resources, through its subsidiary Aurous Guyana. In May 2023, Guyana’s Ministry of Labour cancelled the RMA Cooperative’s registration following an inquiry under the Co-operative Societies ActAccording to reporting in March 2026, mining at Mazoa Hill has continued since, under a permit issued to a legal entity that, on paper, no longer exists. The Rupununi Miners Association disputes that this represents any irregularity, maintaining that operations continue under proper authorisation despite what it describes as administrative restructuring.

This is functionally the same defect Greenpeace identified in its ghost garimpo mine category: a licensing instrument detached from the legal or physical reality it is supposed to certify.

The difference is that Brazil’s ghost permits were typically disconnected from mining activity on the ground; Guyana’s case at Mazoa Hill is disconnected from the legal existence of the permit holder itself — arguably a starker version of the same regulatory failure.

The dispute over what is actually leaving the site has become public and unresolved. Opposition parliamentarians who visited Region Nine in early 2026 alleged that gold worth millions of US dollars is leaving Marudi daily; the GGMC’s Commissioner has publicly rejected claims of large-scale smuggling as lacking technical credibility, while the Rupununi Miners Association has called allegations of foreign control and illegal airstrips unsubstantiated.

Access to the site itself is restricted to those who comply with entry requirements set by the miners’ association, which means the dispute cannot currently be resolved by anyone simply going to look.

None of this is happening in a vacuum for the people who live there. Wapichan communities raised concerns about the original Marudi mining deal as early as 2021 and 2022, when a UN Special Rapporteur communication to Golden Shield Resources noted that affected Indigenous communities appeared to have been consulted only after the mining agreement had already been signed — a sequence inconsistent with international free, prior and informed consent standards.

Subsequent testing identified Parabara village, the community closest to Marudi Mountain, as carrying the highest mercury contamination levels recorded among Indigenous communities studied in the region — a Guyanese parallel to the Fiocruz findings Greenpeace cites from the Munduruku Indigenous Land in Brazil, where the great majority of pregnant women tested carried mercury above safe thresholds.                                                                                     

THE CATARATAS VECTOR: WHEN THE RECORD CROSSES THE BORDER TOO

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What makes Marudi more than a regulatory curiosity is the presence there, as recently as March 2026, of Rodrigo Martins de Mello, a Brazilian national known as Rodrigo Cataratas. A Brazilian federal court sentenced him in February 2026 to more than twenty-two years in prison for leading a criminal organisation that mined illegally inside Yanomami Indigenous Territory — the same protected territory Greenpeace’s Brazil report uses repeatedly to illustrate the human and environmental cost of garimpo expansion. Court documents cited in Guyanese press coverage describe a logistics network of at least twenty-three aircraft used to move miners, fuel, supplies, and extracted minerals into and out of Indigenous land.

Images circulating in early 2026 showed Cataratas alongside senior Guyanese government officials. The South Rupununi District Council, convening a meeting with the GGMC and the Rupununi Miners Association on 14 March, was told by miners present that Cataratas had been operating in the Marudi area and was assured he was no longer there. No independent confirmation of his departure has been offered. Toshaos at that meeting raised explicit concern about the prospect of Brazil’s criminal mining networks establishing themselves in the South Rupununi — language that suggests local Indigenous leadership already understands what this assessment is arguing in writing: that the same operators, not merely the same methods, can move between jurisdictions faster than oversight bodies can track them.                 

THE VERIFICATION GAP: WHY GUYANA CANNOT ANSWER ITS OWN QUESTION

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Guyana’s gold-buying architecture differs from Brazil’s on paper. Where Brazil relied on numerous private broker-dealers shielded by a statutory presumption of good faith.

Guyana centralizes purchase through a single statutory buyer: under the Guyana Gold Board Act, no one may sell or buy gold from anyone other than the Board or its licensed agents. In principle, a monopsony buyer should be easier to audit than a fragmented private market.

In practice, the underlying vulnerability is the same one Greenpeace identified in Brazil. Declared origin and declared volume are accepted at the point of sale without independent geological verification against the size and history of the claim or permit involved. This is not a new concern for Guyana’s gold sector: a Ministry of Finance-linked audit document has previously recorded an episode in which gold believed to have originated in Guyana surfaced in Curaçao accompanied by electronic documentation from Guyanese sources, with the audit noting that recommended follow-up investigation did not appear to have been pursued by the responsible agencies.                         

The mechanism Greenpeace calls the second presumption of good faith, in other words, has a Guyanese precedent.

What Guyana currently lacks is the tool Greenpeace built to resolve exactly this kind of dispute: a productivity benchmark, expressed as gold declared per hectare of permitted area, cross-checked against satellite imagery and flyover validation, capable of distinguishing a permit that is producing the gold it declares from one that is laundering gold mined elsewhere. Applied to the live dispute over Marudi’s output, that methodology would not need access to contested domestic paperwork at all; it works from publicly available satellite data and the declared boundaries of the permit itself — precisely why it is the right tool for a jurisdiction where the underlying GGMC and GGB declaration records are not realistically obtainable through domestic information-access channels.   

WHO WATCHES THE WATCHERS: GYEITI’S CONFLICT OF INTEREST

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Brazil’s federal audit bodies found that the agency responsible for granting and policing PLGs was not exercising the oversight authority the law already gave it. Guyana’s parallel institution for extractive-sector transparency, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative process, has its own documented capture problem. In November 2025, TIGI publicly disputed the government’s appointment of a Civil Society Convenor for Guyana’s EITI process on the grounds that the appointee himself held seventeen mining licenses across roughly nineteen thousand five hundred acres in the Cuyuni Mining District, an arrangement TIGI characterized as incompatible with the independent civil-society oversight role the position is meant to perform.

The detail matters because it answers, in advance, an obvious objection to this assessment’s central recommendation  

Guyana cannot simply ask its own oversight architecture to investigate itself. By TIGI’s own public account, the body specifically designed to give civil society an independent check on extractive-sector data is, at present, occupied by an extractive-sector concession holder

WHY THIS NEEDS GREENPEACE

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Greenpeace Brazil did not produce an opinion about gold laundering in the Amazon; it produced a method.  Royalty declarations benchmarked against permit area, cross-checked with satellite mosaics and validation flyovers, turned a contested political argument about smuggling into a falsifiable, hectare-by-hectare claim about what a piece of land could plausibly have produced. That method does not depend on subpoena power, or access to a mine site, or on cooperation from the agency being investigated. It depends on satellite coverage and public permit boundaries, both of which already exist for Guyana.

TIGI brings what Greenpeace’s Brazil team cannot supply on its own: domestic legitimacy, an anti-corruption mandate dating back to 2010 as Transparency International’s accredited national chapter, and existing relationships with the Indigenous representative bodies whose communities are living with the consequences at Marudi. Greenpeace brings the remote-sensing and forensic-accounting capacity that no Guyanese civil society organization currently has in-house, built and tested on a directly comparable case just across the border.

Neither organization can close Guyana’s verification gap alone. Together, they could turn Marudi from a dispute between an opposition party and a government commissioner into an independently documented fact.

  RECOMMENDATIONS

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1.The Guyana Geology and Mines Commission should require verified production estimates or prior geological survey before granting or renewing Special Mining Permits and small-scale claims, rather than accepting self-declared productive potential — mirroring the authority Greenpeace recommended Brazil’s National Mining Agency actually use.

2.An independent body, ideally the Office of the Auditor General working with external technical support, should review permits and Special Mining Permits generating Guyana Gold Board declarations with no verifiable corresponding production, beginning with the Mazoa Hill SMP tied to a dissolved cooperative.

3.GYEITI’s Civil Society Convenor role should carry an enforceable conflict-of-interest bar against active concession holders, restoring the independent verification function the position was created to provide

4.TIGI should formally invite Greenpeace’s Brazil-based gold-forensics team to extend its satellite-and-productivity methodology to Guyana’s highest-risk permits, starting with Marudi/Mazoa Hill, in partnership with the South Rupununi District Council and the Amerindian Peoples Association.

5.Guyana should pursue an independent, geochemically or satellite-grounded traceability mechanism for its gold sector, since self-certification by permit holders and a single statutory buyer of last resort cannot, on their own, substitute for ground-truthed verification.

Note on sourcing: this assessment is a desk-based comparative analysis drawing on public reporting, court records as cited in the press, NGO and academic studies, and the Greenpeace Brazil report. Claims still disputed by named parties — including the scale of gold leaving Marudi and the current whereabouts of Rodrigo Martins de Mello — are presented as disputed, not as established fact, and are flagged as such in the text and footnotes above.

End.